So Gotham's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness...
The younger versions of everyone are perfectly cast, and the show's self-awareness of who these people are (or will be) is very well handled. The Penguin's rise to power is deliciously written, Catwoman is underused but so on the nose that it's a pleasure whenever she's on screen, the Riddler gets more and more with each episode. I love these backstories, and I love how they're being handled, but....
Bruce Wayne is a troubled 12 year old. He's kind of why we're here watching, yes? But it's going to be a decade before he does anything except be precocious, so they're going to have to either advance his age and the storyline (and change the actor), or convince us that we should be content with a show that hit a plateau in the first episode.
Likewise, young Jim Gordon -- the show's nominal star -- is also boring without Batman. He's just going to be a goodnik cop who can't quite get ahead until a caped crusader comes on the scene, right? For...the next ten seasons? What he's ended up becoming is very strange -- they're doing it so that Jim Gordon inadvertently creates all of the villains. In the pilot, he's single-handedly responsible for setting both Poison Ivy and the Penguin on their trajectories, and he's got a soft spot for young Selina Kyle, keeping her away from the law.
By trying to paint this portrait of a good cop in a bad town who tries to do right even when, maybe, he shouldn't, the show's creators have somehow managed to paint a picture of Jim Gordon as the father of arch-villainy. This could be interesting if it all came around into a tale of regret that leads him, ultimately, to Batman, but he's so two-dimensional it's agonizing. If this were the complicated tale of Jim Gordon, that would be great. Instead, we get poor man's Russell Crowe chewing away at the scenery while actual capable actors are doing amazing things with comic book bad guys all around him.
We're four episodes in and this show has already done everything it can with the story and is at the end of its rope. In fact, the upcoming episodes devolve into mindless things. Episode six is about how the Penguin adopts the use of umbrellas! We're not even at the halfway point and they're out of ideas.
